The Economist: Ye cannae change the laws of physics.

“In a paper just submitted to Physical Review Letters, a team led by John Webb and Julian King from the University of New South Wales in Australia present evidence that the fine-structure constant may not actually be constant after all. Rather, it seems to vary from place to place within the universe. If their results hold up to the scrutiny, and can be replicated, they will have profound implications — for they suggest that the universe stretches far beyond what telescopes can observe, and that the laws of physics vary within it.” Best news I’ve heard in a coon’s age.  Infinite mysteries mean infinite possibilities.

Chronicle of Higher Ed: Will the Book Survive Generation Text?

”I don’t mean the already overwrought debate over the crisis of the book as codex — the daily New York Times announcement that electronic readers stand primed to eliminate paper books. [snip] The issue isn’t the decline in book sales, though it, too, remains an element of the big picture. I am talking about the growing feeling among humanities professors — intuitive and anecdotal, shared over lunch like an embarrassing tale about a colleague — that for too many of today’s undergraduates, reading a whole book, from A to Z, feels like a marathon unfairly imposed on a jogger.” This sadly makes me think of graphic design, where ‘negative space’ is as important as ‘positive space’.  And the risk of losing context.

Inside Higher Ed: ‘American Universities in a Global Market’.

”Between 1995 and 2005 the U.S. share of world article production fell from 34 to 29 percent. Another sure sign of vulnerability is the diminishing numbers of American college students who undertake advanced study in science, technology, engineering, and math, or who persevere once they begin. Between 1970 and 2005, the number of U.S. citizens who obtained doctoral degrees declined 23% in engineering, 44% in physical sciences, and 50% in mathematics.” What do you expect, when we no longer have a respect for education in our culture?

Chronicle of Higher Ed: Revalorizing the Trades.

“Having taught in art schools for most of my four decades in the classroom, I am used to having students who work with their hands—ceramicists, weavers, woodworkers, metal smiths, jazz drummers. There is a calm, centered, Zen-like engagement with the physical world in their lives. In contrast, I see glib, cynical, neurotic elite-school graduates roiling everywhere in journalism and the media. They have been ill-served by their trendy, word-centered educations.” Look around, you’ll see this generalization is rather true.

The Atlantic: What Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, and R. Crumb Have in Common.

”What made these interviews radical was their method.  In the first place, the method is slow. [snip] In the second place, the interviews are collaborative.” Interesting.

Washington Monthly: College Dropout Factories.

”Nestor’s experience of educational incompetence at the college level isn’t just a Chicago phenomenon. Nationwide, low-income minority students are disproportionately steered toward colleges not where they’re most likely to succeed, but where they’re most likely to fail.”

The Economist: Planet hunting: Bode’s law lives!

”There is, in other words, starting to be enough evidence to suggest that Bode’s law might not be a complete fluke. But why might planetary orbits obey such neat patterns, at least some of the time? The researchers speculate that it could be a side-effect of the mechanism by which planetary systems form.” Does this mean there’s a real Da Vinci code?  Heh.

The Atlantic: This Is What the Student Debt Crisis Looks Like.

And we only demonize medical insurance. This is a terrible shame - education is our future.

Nova Roma.

”Dedicated to the restoration of classical Roman religion, culture and virtues.” Via MeFi.

Discover: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids - and What We Can Do About It.

”Higher education should be open to every young person, and this is an option we can well afford.  We confess to being born-again Jeffersonians: we believe everyone has a mind, the capacity to use it, and is entitled to encouragement.” Congruent with my beliefs.

The Neglected Books Page: The History and Social Influence of the Potato.

”… the Epic of the potato.”

NY Times: Students Find $100 Textbooks Cost $50, Purchased Overseas.

”Just like prescription drugs, textbooks cost far less overseas than they do in the United States. The publishing industry defends its pricing policies, saying that foreign sales would be impossible if book prices were not pegged to local market conditions.” I wonder if college students couldn’t work in some international travel, with the cost saved. Go pick up the books themselves, in other words.

NY Times: What ‘Fact-Checking’ Means Online.

”But if the Web has changed what qualifies as fact-checking, has it also changed what qualifies as a fact? I suspect that facts on the Web are now more rhetorical devices than identifiable objects.” Only if we let them. But then, there’s a complicating factor ... see this previous post.

Huffington Post: Does the Past Exist Yet? Evidence Suggests Your Past Isn’t Set in Stone.

“More recently (Science 315, 966, 2007), scientists in France shot photons into an apparatus, and showed that what they did could retroactively change something that had already happened. As the photons passed a fork in the apparatus, they had to decide whether to behave like particles or waves when they hit a beam splitter. Later on - well after the photons passed the fork - the experimenter could randomly switch a second beam splitter on and off. It turns out that what the observer decided at that point, determined what the particle actually did at the fork in the past. At that moment, the experimenter chose his history.” From this moment on, I’m choosing a different history.  Thank you, science!

Inside Higher Ed: Rice University Press, Abandoning an Experiment.

”The demise of the project led to immediate speculation about whether the Rice experience suggested difficulties for the economic model or if other factors may have been decisive. Several experts suggested that the crucial factor may be size.” My concern about turning to digital is that proper professional editing will be short-shrifted in the drive to lower costs.

The Wilson Quarterly: America: Land of Loners?

“Aristotle, who saw friendship as essential to human flourishing, shrewdly observed that it comes in three distinct flavors: those based on usefulness (contacts), on pleasure (drinking buddies), and on a shared pursuit of virtue—the highest form of all. True friends, he contended, are simply drawn to the goodness in one another, goodness that today we might define in terms of common passions and sensibilities.”

NY Times: The Phenomenology of Ugly.

”He certainly has strabismus (with his distinctive lazy eye, so he appears to be looking in two directions at once), various parts of his body are dysfunctional and he considers his ugliness to count as a kind of disability. I can’t help wondering if ugliness is not indispensable to philosophy.” Must be a slow news week.

The Neglected Books Page: The Art of Slow Reading, from The Guardian.

“Sticking to material that can be read quickly and lightly leaves merely proves the saying that a little learning is a dangerous thing.  [snip] Relying exclusively on skimming as one’s way of acquiring knowledge is the intellectual equivalent of eating baby food — which is, essentially, pre-chewed food. Real men chew their own food and real readers roll up their sleeves and dig in.”

The Australian: The Peggy Glanville Hicks Address.

”Here begins one of the dilemmas facing leading arts organisations today. While the presentation of artistic experience of the highest calibre, of the best quality, is their mandate and their reason for existence, to discuss the content of their work as such is to attract accusations of being detached from the real world and of placing themselves somehow above their audience. How can an organisation strive for improvement or demand standards from its artists, when debate about quality is stifled?” A very good read.

Beneath the Underground: The First Five Thousand.

”And herein lies one of the cruelties of the arts: the closer you get to your ten thousand mark, the more appealing the choice to abandon it altogether will appear. It gets easier to quit.”

Book Beast: The Novella is Making a Comeback.

”It’s fashionable to lament the status of the novella: unjustly neglected, the ugly duckling of the literary world, etc. Actually the novella seems in pretty healthy shape to me.”

NY Times: Philosophy and Faith.

”The students realize that I’m not going to be able to give them a convincing proof, and I let them in on the dirty secret: philosophers have never been able to find arguments that settle the question of God’s existence or any  of the other ‘big questions’ we’ve been discussing for 2500 years.”

SF New Mexican: Three out of 30 Santa Fe Public Schools meet goals.

”Administrators say scores illustrate assessment’s shortcomings.” There’s a spin for you. The system sounds a bit arcane.

NY Times: Lines on Plagiarism Blur for Students in the Digital Age.

”At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.  At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.” Woof.

The New York Review of Books: Words.

”Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously (’It’s only my opinion ...’). Rather than suffering from the onset of ‘newspeak,’ we risk the rise of ‘nospeak.’” Yet in these litigious times, we webloggers have to be guarded in our utterances. Also, some find articulate verbosity offensive in others, as if an expression of haughty superiority. Add that we’re often warned not to write prose ‘too high’ on the Flesch–Kincaid grade level test.

There’s significant ‘dumb-down’ pressure these days, and it’s a terrible shame. It’s not like Dictionary.com isn’t a click away.